Mexican food and culture, on both sides of the border
Joy and I are skipping off to Pie de la Cuesta for Thanksgiving, where we’ll be stuffing our faces with fresh ceviche and shrimp cocktails instead of turkey and pumpkin pie.
I can’t even begin to describe what I’ve been thankful for over the past year. This life, the food, the people I’ve met… every day is an adventure, and I’m so grateful to be able to share it all with my husband, my favorite person in the world.
I hope you enjoy your holiday and find some time to reflect, wherever you are!
The Monte de Piedad, lying northwest of Mexico City’s zócalo, is not your typical pawn shop. It’s a huge, elegant place, housed in a 16th century building that once belonged to Hernan Cortez. They’ve got estate jewelry, antique furniture and even artesanías from Oaxaca. (The latter haven’t been pawned, but are instead offered for tourists like me who wander around gaping at the place.)
The institution opened its doors in 1775, with the goal of offering short-term loans to people who needed them. Today, as has been the case for two centuries, this is still what happens here. Pretty much anyone can get a loan as long as you offer a piece of collateral as deposit. According to Wikipedia, the recovery rate of pawned items is about 96 percent.
My friend Ruth showed me the place last week, and it’s an impressive building to visit. We wandered down the wide hallways and touched the porous, lava-rock walls. We stared at the ceiling, much of it covered with a stained-glass skylight. Various salons stemmed off the main hallway, filled with glass cases containing clusters of vintage-looking rings, bracelets, gold and silver hoop earrings.
We decided to buy a few artesanía items, because they were cheaper than what you’d find at La Ciudadela, another Mexican artesanía area near the Centro.
Unfortunately, because this was technically a pawn shop, and not just that but a pawn shop in Mexico, the purchasing process was almost assured to take up most of the afternoon. The seller first had to tear off the small, perforated price tags on our desired items. Then we took those to a separate cashier window, which abruptly closed before we’d even gotten to the front of the line. So we were transferred to another cashier window, where we waited with about 20 other people.
The line inched along, and just when I was starting to think, “Is my cute yellow bag from Oaxaca really worth it?” I noticed a sign taped to the cashier’s window: “Foreigners paying with credit or debit cards must provide a passport as identification.”
A passport?! Who takes a passport with them to the Centro Histórico?
We tried to protest our case, but the cashier rejected us.
Ruth, feisty woman that she is, didn’t take no for an answer. She complained to the management about the injustice of taping a tiny sign to the front of a cashier window, and how upsetting it was that our seller, while he spent about 15 minutes gently tearing off the perforated price tags, didn’t say anything about needing a passport, even though he worked in the pawn shop’s most touristy section. And he knew we were foreigners.
I didn’t think much would come of it, but surprisingly her entreaties worked. I left with a new yellow purse and a embroidered blouse.
Lesson to you: If you go to Mexico’s largest pawn shop and you’re not Mexican, bring cash. Or your credit card and passport.
*Photo via Vivir Mexico and La Jornada
The Bears game was on TV on Sunday night, meaning Crayton would spend the evening wearing his Bears jersey and glued to the screen.
I’d told him I’d watch with him, but when it came down to it, I found myself too busy. The kitchen needed cleaning. We planned to grill vegetables for dinner, so I needed to slice the eggplant and squash. How long did it take to grill eggplant, anyway? I needed to consult Google. Oh, and I needed to read up on yoga ashrams in India, since we decided last week that we’re traveling to India in January. (Which is completely insane, amazing news.)
Plus, since this was game day, we needed game-time snacks. I put on a frilly white apron — very appropriate for the game-day hostess persona I had suddenly created for myself — and unearthed a package of pre-sliced jicama from the fridge. Drizzled it with lime juice and chili powder.
Opened a package of nopal tortillas, cut them into triangles with kitchen shears and baked them. I adore nopal tortillas, made from a mix of cactus and corn, because they’re bright green and slightly healthier than regular tortillas. (Meaning: less calories and a tad more nutrients from the cactus.) You can find them at pretty much any grocery store here, and they’ve got kind of a light, vegetal taste. Unfortunately they tend to fall apart if you use them for tacos. But as psuedo-tortilla chips, they’re perfect.
While my chips baked, I made a quick, creamy tofu dip with cilantro and chipotle peppers.
Placed everything on a platter and took it into hubby, who was yelling about the defense, or a fumble, or something. He didn’t look up when I sat down. I munched on some jicama and thought: Wow, jicama with chili and lime might be the new chicken wings. It’s really that good.
“Isn’t this good?” I asked Crayton. I was still wearing my white apron.
“Yeah, it’s great,” he said. He took his eyes from the screen only to dip his chip in the dip cup.
The Bears ended up losing. I considered the day a win, though. Found and emailed an interesting ashram in India. And we had lots of jicama and dip leftover. Crayton, sweet man that he is, finished the dishes after I’d gone to bed.
Baked nopal tortilla chips with creamy cilantro tofu dip
Serves 4 to 6 as an appetizer
Note: This dip has a really strong cilantro taste, and as a cilantro-lover, I find you can’t use too much. Canned chipotle peppers in adobo freeze really well, so don’t worry about using such a small portion in this dip. If you can’t find nopal tortillas, corn work fine too. The dip can be refrigerated in an airtight container for about two days.
Ingredients
6 nopal tortillas
1 349g box silken tofu (about 12 ounces)
1/2 c. cilantro leaves, loosely packed
1 teaspoon diced chipotle pepper in adobo
1 to 2 tablespoons olive oil
Salt to taste
Preheat oven to 375F or 200C. Using kitchen shears, cut nopal tortillas in half, and then cut each half into five triangles. Place on baking sheet and cook about 5 to 10 minutes, until golden brown.
While the chips are baking, add silken tofu, cilantro leaves and chipotle pepper to food processor. With the motor running, add olive oil in a slow stream. The dip should be spoonable but not runny. Taste and see if it needs more cilantro, or more chipotle pepper. When you’re satisfied, scoop with a spatula into a serving bowl and add salt to taste. Drink with cold beer.
After lunch on Saturday, Crayton and I went on a stroll through Plaza Rio de Janeiro in the Roma neighborhood. An ice cream vendor there caught my eye: she sat under a little tarp, with her metal ice cream cylinders wedged inside ice-packed buckets. Her flavors had been written in a whimsical font. One was fig with mezcal.
“Oooh, fig with mezcal!” I told Crayton.
“Do you want one?”
At this point we’d already walked by the place. “Well… no,” I said. “I shouldn’t.”
We’d just eat lunch. Which had included bacon.
“Are you sure?”
It’s truly astonishing how many times Crayton knows me better than I know me. I did want one, so we went back and I tasted the fig, which ended up being too sweet. But she also had mamey, a popular flavor in Mexico. Unbelievably, despite my mamey obsession, I hadn’t tried mamey ice cream yet. So I got one scoop.
I can’t even describe to you how good it was. It was kind of pumpkiny, and melon-y, and I think I detected some cinnamon. This morning I woke up thinking about it. And then I thought: I need to have an ice cream tasting party. I will gather all my ice-cream loving friends, make an ice-cream themed music mix, and then churn up three Mexican-inspired ice creams that I’ve been dreaming of lately: mamey, crema and piloncillo. We will have mamey splits, like a banana split, but better. We’ll cover our scoops with pumpkin seeds instead of walnuts. We’ll drink Kahlua-spiked coffee. (Which isn’t ice cream-ish, but fun nonetheless.)
This is going to happen. Stay tuned.
Two of my Mexican friends, Jesica and Martha, have been teasing me about my high concha roll standards. They can’t understand how I didn’t like Maque’s conchas. “We’re going give you a blind taste test!” they said. My response: Bring it.
A teensy part of me was starting to lose faith, though. How could I have only found one great concha roll so far, after so much testing?
The concha gods must have felt my pain, because yesterday, they redeemed my faith. I finally tried the conchas at El Cardenal, the famous restaurant in the Centro Historico. Mexico guidebooks tout the place as having the best breakfast in the city. And some of you also recommended the restaurant’s conchas in the comments.
I admit, I wondered whether the hype would be justified. In my experience in Mexico, people rave about a place, I go, and half the time it ends up being just okay. But this place was different.
We waited 20 minutes for a table — which my dining companion Ruth told me was typical for a weekday — and were given menus full of amazing-sounding breakfast items: “apporeado con huevo,” or scrambled eggs mixed with thin slices of beef in a guajillo chile sauce; “hacienda de Puebla,” a concoction of sunny side-up eggs on tortillas with refried beans, cheese and strips of poblano peppers; “revueltos con chilorio,” or eggs Sinaloa-style mixed with minced pork, tomatoes and dried chiles. We chose three plates and decided to share.
First up were the gorditas hidalguenses, a dish from the state of Hidalgo comprising tortillas soaked in salsa verde, filled with shredded meat and topped with shredded cheese. They looked like they’d taste heavy, but they didn’t. The dish was light but still comforting, and brightened up by a big dose of cilantro.
Then came the huevos ahogados, two poached eggs that sat in a stew of warm black beans, onions, chiles and thick chunks of panela cheese, which is made at the restaurant’s own dairy. The bean broth was so good, you just had to soak it up with a crusty piece of bread.
We had a tortilla, or Spanish omelet, with escamoles (ant eggs) and diced nopal. It was the first time I’d tried ant eggs, and sadly, they didn’t really taste like anything. In the photo below, the ant eggs are those little white-bean looking things.
Before all of it, though, we had the concha. It arrived on at tray, carried by a black-and-white suited waiter. I pointed at it and he placed it on my plate. It was still warm.
Fork in hand, I cut into it and it gave easily — good sign. The last thing you want is a concha that’s so tough, it requires a knife. This roll was still soft. Pliable. I took a bite and tasted warm butter and just a smidge of yeast. The topping crunched slightly, due to all the sugar granules.
It was everything you’d want a concha roll to be: comforting, lightly sweet, moist but not too dense. And actually, I almost liked the topping better than Bondy’s, which tends to smother the top of the bread. El Cardenal’s concha topping looked more authentic, with thin stripes quilted over the roll’s crown.
The best way to experience this roll is with a cup of the restaurant’s homemade hot chocolate. The waiter offers it as soon as you sit down. I’m not generally a big hot chocolate fan, but the experience of the two together was — I’m going to say it, and I don’t care if it sounds overstated — luxurious. It’s one of those things that leaves you shaking your head in awe. Or at least, it left me shaking my head in awe.
Can’t wait to go back. I only tried two pieces of sweet bread from the waiter’s tray.
The black sapote is a popular tropical fruit in Mexico, and it’s a funny-looking thing when it’s completely ripe. The hard green skin turns soft, dimply, and sunken-in in parts. It looks like a shrunken head, kind of.
After cutting it open, the flesh resembles dark-chocolate brownie batter. It’s glossy and wet and easy to scoop out with a spoon.
I bought a sapote (pronounced “sah-POE-tay” in Spanish; locally they’re known as zapote negro) for the first time last week at the tianguis, figuring I’d think of something fun to do with it. It supposedly makes a great tart filling, jazzed up with a little lime juice. But I nixed that idea, since we were leaving for Tulum in a few days.
Then I remembered a granola recipe I’d seen on David Lebovitz’s site not too long ago. The recipe called for mixing the oats with an apple or pear puree. Why not substitute sapote? I’d tasted some at Alice’s house, and it had a mild, lightly sweet flavor. And we could eat our granola on the beach.
So I put my little dimply sapote on a plate, and took a picture of it, because it was so round and cute.
And then I cut it open and scooped out the flesh. Didn’t I tell you it looks like brownie batter? Or pudding? Its other name is the “chocolate pudding fruit.” The sapote is in the persimmon family, by the way.
I pureed the flesh with a spoon — with entailed about five seconds of stirring on my part — and then mixed that with a bit of oil and agave honey. (Agave honey isn’t as sweet regular honey, and I wanted to err on the side of caution.) Added pumpkin seeds, sliced almonds, oats, cinnamon and a few other spices. Also discovered a forgotten bag of sucanat in the back of my pantry, so I used that instead of regular sugar, since I was being experimental and all. (Sucanat is a pebbly, unrefined cane sugar, with more of a molasses-y taste than regular brown sugar.)
Spread it all onto a baking sheet and just about died while it cooked. The house filled with this warm, spicy-sweet smell of toasted oats and cinnamon. Desperately wanted to Twitter: “I cannot wait to try my black sapote puree granola!” but then I thought that’d be lame, so I kept my giddiness to myself. (Actually, I think I emailed Alice, because she was the one who told me she loved black sapote in the first place.)
After it cooled, it tasted just as fabulous as I’d hoped: slightly sweet, nutty, crunchy. The spices and the sapote mixed together beautifully — nothing overpowered anything else, while at the same time, it all seemed like it was somehow meant to go together. Crayton tried a handful after I made him and then went back for seconds, and thirds.
I’d like to say I’m open-minded and that I’d try this granola with another type of fruit puree, but right now I’m so in love that I can’t. What if another fruit transforms my granola into a sickly sweet mess? Right now, it’s black sapote for me or bust.
Granola with pumpkin seeds, almonds and black zapote puree
Adapted from David Lebovitz’s Top Granola post
Makes about 5 cups
Ingredients
1 medium black zapote, equal to 1/4 c. plus 2 tablespoons black zapote puree
2 1/2 c. oats
1/2 c. pepitas, unsalted
1/4 c. sucanat, or sweetener of your choice
1 teaspoon cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon ground ginger
1/2 teaspoon sea salt
1/4 c. honey
1 tablespoon vegetable oil
Preheat the oven to 175C or 300F. Cut open your zapote, scoop out the flesh into a bowl, and puree lightly with a spoon. (It should have a lumpy-pudding like consistency.) Set aside. In another bowl, whisk together oats, pepitas, sucanat, cinnamon, ground ginger and sea salt, until well combined.
In a small saucepan, gently warm the puree, honey and oil together. Add the warm puree sauce to the oat mixture, and mix well. Spread on an ungreased baking sheet and cook for 50 minutes or until deep golden brown, stirring every 10 minutes to ensure even browning. Cool on a rack. When it’s completely cooled, store in an airtight container. Resist the urge to stuff handfuls in your mouth.
Went to enter my sister-in-law’s birthday in our Google Calendar today, and “Dinner at Pancho’s” popped up as the example. We don’t know anyone named Pancho yet. But still. Eerie.
I’m not generally the type of person who goes gaga over the beach. Crayton and I prefer exploring big cities — we went to Buenos Aires on our honeymoon, Madrid when we were first dating, San Francisco on our first anniversary.
That said, I went completely and utterly nuts over Tulum. Like, sitting on the beach and muttering, “I can’t believe it. I can’t believe it.”
The water was so bright and green and clear, it was otherworldly. (Had we been transported into another galaxy and I didn’t know it?) On a cloudless night, thousands of stars appeared, as if God had ushered in the evening by tossing a handful of beach sand over his shoulder.
On Friday, the first night we arrived, we stopped drinks at a trendy beach bar and I just kept staring dumbly at the sky. Most hotels cut their electricity off around 11 p.m. but this one didn’t. The result, while looking out over the water, ended up being this vast, inky nothingness topped by millions of twinkling points of light. Picture all of that, set to pulsing trance music. It felt like a party on the edge of the world, or what it might be like to live in a half-finished painting. For a crazy second I wondered if we really were living in a half-finished painting. (This trip exposed my suppressed Ray Bradbury side.) Crayton and I tried to pick out the Little Dipper, but we couldn’t remember exactly what it looked like, so we searched for it on Crayton’s Blackberry. Even out there we had data service.
Before we left for Tulum, I thought: We’ll go to the ruins! We’ll swim in cenotes! I’m a do-er, normally. But on this trip all we did was laze by the beach.
By Monday I’d memorized the waves’ slow, gentle crescendo, and the floury feel of the sand on my palms, and the sound of palapa fronds rustling in the breeze. I read one book and half of two more. We sipped beers under an umbrella and ate fresh ceviche. We had piña coladas on a terrace that overlooked the Caribbean. (Whereupon Crayton mused, “I think the beach is pretty much the only appropriate place for a man to order a piña colada.”)
I’d feared that Tulum would be too touristy, too trendy, and too full of vendors. But overall, it was exactly what we were looking for: a quiet, unbelievably beautiful place to relax. If you’re interested in the details (where we stayed and ate), I’ve left them below, plus a few pictures.
…
Monday’s a Mexican holiday, so Crayton and I are heading out to Tulum for the weekend. It’s a beach area about two hours south of Cancun, famous for its white-powder sand and turquoise water.
Blogging may be light… but when I get back, I’m going to wow you with tales of my homemade granola with black sapote puree. Made some last night as a snack to take with us on our trip, and oh man it was good.
Looking forward to warmth again. Last night I seriously had to cover my face with the sheet and comforter, it was so cold.
*Photo courtesy of About.com, via the Mexican Tourism Board
One of the things I’ve noticed in Mexico City is the politeness people have toward the poor. Countless times I’ve heard Mexicans say “no, thank you” to beggars pleading for change.
It’s the same way with street vendors peddling their wares. The vendor may interrupt your shopping trip at the tianguis, or your conversation at a sidewalk cafe, to push the greatness of wooden salsa spoons, mesh strainers, plants, rugs. Instead of acting annoyed, it’s culturally acceptable to say no thank-you. If the vendor persists, the person being intruded upon might say, “No, thank you, very kind of you to offer.”
And the way the word thank-you sounds: It has this semi-regretful tone, as if the person with money really would love to help out, but he can’t right now, and he really appreciates the poorer person asking.
I’m so curious as to where this behavior comes from. Does it stem from Mexicans’ overwhelming value of work, and so beggars are not disregarded because they’re only trying to make a few pesos? Or are Mexicans just generally more empathetic toward the poor than Americans, because more Mexicans live in poverty, or know people who do?
In the U.S., when people asked me for change, I ignored them. Crayton and I did donate money to charities that helped the homeless. But I hardly ever looked a homeless person, or a poor person, in the eye. Here I do often. But (I shamefully admit), I only started doing it because everyone else was, too.
Any Mexicans out there care to elaborate on this? And for all the Americans, why aren’t we more polite to the poor? Should we be?